Taming the time - part1

Muser felt annoyed by the attitude shown by some of his friends, especially Bystander's sons and Tom's daughters. Time and again he has been hearing their complaints about time, rather the lack of it! He was hard put to understand how this universal quantity could vary from person to person. Falling outside the realm of Einstein’s relativity, he himself had felt time running out when in joy or walking dead slow during periods of sadness.

This paradox has another parallel, for quite opposite reasons – when days run out on students feeling the tension, during preparation for exams, and days taking unduly long time in the case of young hearts looking forward to their wedding. But what reasons Bystander and Tom had?

Muser decided to dig to the bottom of the matter and see what came up? There was a personal angle too in this quest which made him redouble his efforts to find and bell the cat. The catalysts for this timely reaction had come from two of his friends and he, a writer with jumbo sized imaginative ego, became the reactant. In the recent past, the stagnating throughput from his desk started to diminish the returns on his efforts.

Frustrated, he became his own devil’s advocate but was dissatisfied with the received advises that lacked conviction. It only helped in doubling his annoyance at his close friends.

He set to work to make them to realise what a excuse they were making as a cover up. Armed with a calculator he figured out that there are 86400 seconds or 1440 minutes in a day. The mathematics was not reassuring and he decided to ‘spend the minutes’ as his friends would be doing in a day. This approach looked better, at least to his mind, and stared the process of checking out where every minute of the day was going. Striving to be a perfectionist, if a need arose to argue with someone, Muser meticulously timed their expenditure to find out why they are not free to spare him a little help.

The fact that his friends lived in different parts of the country did not deter him in carrying out this census but the task was time consuming. His inner mind comforted him by pointing out that he need not even step out of the continent for this work. Anyhow he wanted to enjoy their company and rile them a bit!

In all, Muser spent about three weeks for staying with his friends, on invitation of course, to complete his time-study and another three days to prepare a draft copy of his findings:

Muser was aware that certain activities in a person’s life are considered essential and demand a major chunk of time in a day. Work and travel in the city traffic having become an integral part of professional life, it accounted for ten hours or 600 minutes. To provide support for the day to day requirements of the family another four hours or 240 minutes are spent in shopping, socialising and other household works to be carried out. To keep up going through this grinding routine day after day, rest and recuperation in the form of sleep needs eight hours or 480 minutes. Here he paused to count the remaining time in a day which came to just 2 hours or 120 minutes.

Appreciating the value of these minutes, he went over his notes to pinpoint activities that are essential, productive and unproductive yet jostling for a pie from this remainder. He felt compelled, at this point of time, to empathise with finance ministers who split hairs and juggle the numbers to present annual budgets.

Under essential category he put an hour of T V time as this can turn productive for planning next day’s agenda or to relieve stresses brought from workplace. If reading and exercise could be dovetailed with the TV programmes, this one hour could be turned in to most productive phase of the day.  He did not want to get in to an argument on this as anyway the time is spent in front of the T V. Even under the guise of exchange of information unproductive complaints and gossips cannot be ruled out from taking its due share of 30 minutes in a day. Muser wondered ‘What could not be done in the remaining 30 minutes of time, every day and why these habitual multi-taskers could not take up my papers , at least on the sidelines?'

These most valuable minutes of the day can be spent to get in touch with relatives and friends. Pending correspondences can be completed. Personal hobbies and development activities can be pursued. The specialty about this golden 30 minutes is this: it can fit in to any of the time slot in a day! In the case of a studious person, the entire 30 minutes can be earmarked to complete a specific task by careful planning. He estimated that about 30 to 40 minutes are essential to read his article and send comments by e-mail, unless extensive interactions are required. So far they have not complained about lack of clarity in the subject matter or cogent presentation of thoughts.

Muser wanted to ask them, “When the two of you never fail to boast about your planning acumen, why not come together to share, review and send comments?  Do I have friends who cannot spare this little time every week to help reading a draft? Don’t they know that when somebody asking for a favour is actually showing you a favour? Don’t they know that to read someone’s draft is a privilege extended to a worthy person?”

All these homework did not help him to find an answer to his question “Why his friends kept on complaining about lack of time?” He decided to confront them with his compiled data and see how they would react to it. If serious objections were raised, he was prepared to carry out another elaborate time-study on them since he had been a little liberal on the first count!